May Rekt Report

I sat down with?Chris Dolinski?of?Vibehut, whom I spend much of the night at?DeSo Foundation's anniversary in LA discussing decentralized social media, to discuss his virtual networking platform that allows you to login to the site with your Twitter, Metamask, or DeSo blockchain wallet to join community groups or jump directly onto a networking call.

As an interviewer, I'm always seeking the simplest tooling. There's an inverse relation between how complicated something is to the likelihood that coordinating that interview will go smoothly.

I'm an active user of the?Callin?app, which allows you to fire-up it up & immediately begin recording a podcast, jumping onto a Twitter-spaces type room already recording to listen in on, or listen to recorded podcasts. I'm bullish on?Spotify's video and audio-based podcast platform where hosts can draw from a considerable audience, without being under the thumb of YouTube, and only be tethered by Spotify's RSS feed media scrape.

As the?#nocode?revolution has put on full display, simplicity, without compromising quality, is of the utmost importance. Platforms that take pains to promote this ease of use will be handsomely rewarded with an exploding user base and adoption levels that will give them the momentum they need to succeed.

Vibehut is focused on building interest communities of like-minded people and then building those connections through this 1-on-1 video call to cement rapport and bounce around ideas. This is as meaningful as hitting the conference room floor and building LinkedIn connections with conference goers.

I was telling Chris that at?LA Blockchain Summit?I was surprised to see that I was getting more connections from the virtual conference, during Covid, because the virtual conference platform was so efficient in matching me with people with similar interests and backgrounds. I, for one, can attest to the fact that virtual networking works and leads to meaningful connections, deals, and partnerships.

Being technically minded, Chris also integrated blockchain features that I haven't seen before such as being able to see if someone holds a particular NFT. That would allow holders of Damien Hirst's NFTs, say, to be able to only join a room if Vibehub could see, by scraping their blockchain wallet address, if they held this NFT in the connected wallet. This introduces a way to join a community of NFT investors that may be useful for someone networking in the space for a job or to find a cofounder.

WIth Vibehub, they would just login with their Metamask, click over to the room, and be immediately connected with someone from the lobby.

Platforms that innovate and simplify the path to progress of network or content creation add tremendous value and represent the type of innovative tech that makes?#Web3?both the newest and most exciting iteration of the internet to date.

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Blockchain companies are known for making bold profitability projections, only to be scoffed at by analysts or contrarians who are happy to list off the challenges they'll face to materialize that they deem to be a fanciful vision.

While many fail to reach their intended destination,?Coinbase?represents a standout example of being able to build from an existing leadership position, growing from 1.2B to 7.8B in revenue and 322M to 3,096M in income within a year. This is an impressive 9x profitability jump in a space with ample competition led by the most agile minds in tech.

Just as analysts were circumspect about Coinbase's ability to eclipse their first billion in profits, they remain skeptical about their ability to navigate the market headwinds. I wouldn't be so quick to count them out.

Besides?Brian Armstrong?demonstrating himself to be an exceptionally capable blockchain visionary, the talent pool that Coinbase has taken on is among the finest in the industry, with the bulk of the smartest minds in the space going to there or one of?ConsenSys' many divisions.

While there is price competition on trading fees, this is often an afterthought for users who just want a familiar solution in an otherwise unfamiliar, intimidating, and opaque space. If someone is trading $10,000 a month will they jump over to a competitor to save the cost of coffee? Unlikely.

Coinbase's power in its tremendous user base who are comfortable with the brand as a jumping off point into the world of cryptocurrencies. From this familiar position, Coinbase can introduce their 89 million users into decentralized social media platforms, other promising cryptocurrency projects, and staking opportunities. The exchange fees are just the first part of the puzzle for?#Coinbase?with the real value being in having captured such a broad user base, with the crown jewel being the 11,000 well-heeled institutional partners.

A full $517 million of their revenue came from Coinbase's "Subscription & Services" with includes staking and other creative ways to leverage their crypto holdings to earn the type of recurring revenue that increases alongside the value of the underlying?#crypto?holdings i.e. 5% on a cryptocurrency worth $100 is paying $5 but that same 5% yields $10 if the value rises to $200.

For projects like?Rekt Tech, offering DAO treasury management and B2B DeFi solution structuring, Coinbase's efforts to demonstrably show how profitable staking and treasury structuring can bring?#Web3?projects the profitability they're seeing has been a powerful way to cement a concept in someone's mind.

When I give talks to groups of bankers, the two questions I get are on central bank digital currencies and Coinbase. From an initial P/E of 267 to its present 7.75, it now represents a value play in a space where value is often difficult to find.

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The Wall Street Journal?did a piece entitled NFT Sales are Flatlining, showing, from the September 2021 peak, a decline in 92% in NFT sales, 88% in active wallets, 94% for OpenSea downloads, and 64% for top 50 in crypto apps global downloads. What are the top blockchain brands doing during this crypto winter? Research.

Andreessen Horowitz?hired the dream team of blockchain academics in?Tim Roughgarden,?Dan Boneh,?Joseph Bonneau,?Dr. Benedikt Bunz,?Scott Kominers?&?Valeria Nikolaenko?to construct their crypto research team. The aim is for such research to best position their a16z multi-billion dollar crypto fund to deliver impressive returns, to match historically impressive returns, reflective of the forethought delivered by this cutting-edge internal research.

Avichal Garg?raised some eyebrows when he revealed that 68% of?Electric Capital's team are software engineers & designers, giving them the tech competency to do the type of research they need for internal or public-facing reports that communicates crypto topics authoritatively. Research matters in being able to double-click on important trends more granularity, delivering powerful takeaways that can seismically impact a fund's performance.

While such research delivers profitability opportunities as well as being a public good, if widely released, it also reflects favorably on brands who are benefactors of authoritative Web3 research.

Superlunar, a?Gemini?Opportunity Fund extension, invests in multidisciplinary research that delves into topics across the ecosystem because it strengthens the fabric of web3's infrastructure. The?FTX?Future Fund similarly offers grants to fund across-the-board blockchain research as well as ambitiously funding plans for epistemic institutions, policy decisions that would deescalate political tensions, containing catastrophic biorisks, and space governance.

Interest in blockchain goes through peaks and valleys. While flying, few passengers are rattled while experiencing turbulence because they understand the fundamentals of the plane's operation is sound. Similarly, seasoned blockchainers are here for the tech and not focused on price movements or market noise.

If the?Google?keyword search volume is any indication of broad interest, we're currently in a downward dip. When blockchain sentiment shifts, as it radically has in a dozen boom and busts since bitcoin's birth 13 years ago, and trends upwards, these companies will be well-positioned to reap the rewards from months of keeping their head down and innovating while fair-weather technophiles pivot elsewhere, only to return as visibility returns.

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While we think of NFTs as having value derived from the artist, collectors, brand partnerships, and utility with the media attached--music, visual art, or videos--we rarely see a serious consideration for provenance, treating an NFT like a piece of contemporary art.

There's a strong case that not only do NFTs represent the newest iteration of digital art, cemented by high-profile sales with?Sotheby's?&?Christie's, but that the movement is well underway, with a track record by well-established artists like Damien Hirst jumping into the space when every other medium and tool was also available.

Many see NFT artists as already tech savvy, like the well-known programmer & digital artist?Beeple, or an angel investor in a Web3 organization smartly using their visibility, such as?Gary Vaynerchuk, to bring awareness to the NFT platforms under their ownership umbrella, like?VeeFriends.

If you owned a piece of Western art that hung in the White House while Teddy Roosevelt was president and the same sized piece by the same artist and subject was sitting in the basement of an art dealer, the White House version would be worth more based on the art's provenance. Compelling stories, connected with documentation, can make a work double or triple in value.

Many art dealers understand the power of provenance and will weave in celebrities to collect a particular artist, manufacture collaborations, take a painting to a historically significant place or event to be photographed, or invest in the narrative that will accomplish this work forever. However contrived, this practice works, especially ones that land works of art in Museum exhibitions.

To keep up on the latest NFT use case innovations, when they come across my Twitter, I've been following the NFT2Space DAO, which quite literally sends NFTs from?Bored Ape Yacht Club,?CryptoPunks?& other blue-chip collections worth millions of dollars to space on a?SpaceX?rocket with?Artemis Music Entertainment?to build an out of this world provenance.

Fittingly, for the genesis flight, most of the NFT characters wore space suits.

The most successful blockchain projects are regularly pushing themselves fearlessly into uncharted waters, putting on full display how?#blockchain?represents the cutting edge of tech. If you're not innovating, you're stagnating.

I applaud NFTs2Space,?Tokn Music,?DeSo Foundation, and all NFT platforms that are driven on a quest to introduce fresh ideas and innovation with immediate utility to the?#Web3?space, empowering content creators with the tools to become the type of big winners that centralized social media and tech platforms were with Web2.

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Many are quick to dismiss the?Coinbase?NFT platform as a "too little, too late" effort, but doing so underestimates the potential power of decentralized social media being favorably presented to their 89 million users.

Already 2.5 million are on the wait list for the much-anticipated platform. Smartly, this social network takes on a familiar Instagram feel that will resonate with those pivoting over from Web2 social media platforms.

While 86% of Coinbase's revenue comes from trading fees, Coinbase Ventures, their investment arm, enjoys a significant level of coverage on blue chip blockchain projects. This NFT-focused social media platform represents a continuity in their efforts to remain diversified across all of blockchain while serving up an excellent opportunity to leverage their massive user base.

While it's true that?Binance?&?FTX?have NFT marketplaces, they're not like this. This more closely resembles the well-regarded?DeSo Foundation?social media platform that is more of a functional decentralized Twitter with capabilities to support NFTs, DAOs, and a host of decentralized applications build on an open blockchain architecture designed with robust social media storage capabilities. They have DeSo nodes like?NFTz.zone?that integrate the?Instagram-esque dashboard, but Coinbase's platform lets you use your existing profile.

As?Ryan Whitehead?of Coinbase has been chronicling, this has been a thoughtful process of iterating and delivering a social media platform with longevity in mind for a user base that will stress test the features to the max. Keeping the features modest to start is smart in that users can learn as they get familiar.

Coinbase's revenue grew 500% in 2021 and while its growth has stalled, many were impressed that the initial lofty IPO price was eventually met with an abundance of profits, presently at a 9.53 P/E, representing a value play and reflection that analysts feel that Coinbase is facing too strong of headwinds to keep delivering profits from sizable trading volumes given?Robinhood, FTX, and?Gemini?foes who are also well-connected and capitalized.

In the?Bloomberg LP?piece profiling the Coinbase?#NFT?platform, my fellow Los Angelino?Jeff Dorman, CFA?rightly points out that “Equity analysts just don’t believe Coinbase will be able to generate any revenues outside of trading in any meaningful way." Couple that with the 67% drop in volume on?OpenSea?and?Google?searches being way down on core keywords like NFT, crypto, and blockchain and you have analysts who are circumspect about Coinbase's ability to push through these challenges.

Also consider that 0.6% on Bitcoin at $40,000 is a lot less than 0.6% when it was at $68,000. That being said, over 10,000 institutional clients invest aggressively with Coinbase irrespective of the market cycle.

Dismissing Coinbase's promising new platform, their ability to diversify, or potential to earn ample fees from their user base represents a bet not thoughtfully considered.

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While many know the Pareto 80/20 rule i.e. 80% of sales come from 20% of clients, the more important for blockchain may be Price's Law, applied to creative and coding work, asserting that 50% of the results come from the square root of the participants i.e. 33 from 1000 coders will create platforms that will yield over 50% of the revenue that all 1000 are seeking.

At?Altcoin Accelerator, I carefully consider decks sent in, but also meaningfully track progress of all blockchain start-ups with a public-facing presence, those who separate themselves spectacularly from their peers and those who fold up shop under the comfort, often, of anonymity.

The true leaders recognize that they are fundamentally knowledge workers and set aside time for intellectual exercises, in the form of questions, that can have real world applicability. They also invest in R&D to build out comprehensive answers to what-if questions, positioning them best to traverse the uncertain and ever-changing world of blockchain's many en vogue movements.

- What are my competitors doing better than I am and what processes are they implementing to yield their successes?

- How do the taste makers, influencing those whom I wish to target, feel about their platform versus mine?

- How much would it cost in time and resources to replicate the platform of my competitors?

- What is the step-by-step processes would compel a client to jump ship from my competitor to me?

- What mistakes have platforms in my space made and what takeaways can be gleaned?

Many think that they're smart enough to figure it out as they go, without a set of battle tested processes and insights from breaking down the complex progressions that their competitors have invested in, integral to their success. No, you're not.

The immediate pressures of putting out fires and delivering solutions to problems that one may mistakenly believe are the best use of one's time will rob you of your ability to have self-awareness and proactively position your platform best for success.

Double trouble are the positive feedback loops which help market leaders, or those with sharpened processes allowing them to gain visibility, allowing them to ratchet up prominence and influence far faster than those left behind would be able to reasonably hope to. Unless you're incredibly well capitalized, this lead becomes often so wide that trying to sink a leader far in front represents a fool's errand. For that reason, you'll see so many large platforms simply buy ones that are seeing enormous growth, to stop what could be a material threat before it grows into a foreboding presence.

For all of the brilliant?#blockchain?brains, the vast majority are focused on the code and often fail to take a step back to see the perspective of looking across the entirety of the forest. Those platforms that get it are continually investing in R&D, not just for the ample tax credits, but because reverse engineering your competitors is imperative to survive.

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Someone asked me this week if the forthcoming fall, they predict, of blue-chip NFTs spells the destruction of blockchain's utility. No.

Blockchain's greatest utility may be being able to trust counterparties, even those who are anonymous, with a digital ledger that broadcasts digital actions, through transactions, to thousands of nodes to corroborate. If blockchain can iron out issues of trust internationally, by allowing partnerships to more nimbly form and sustain, then that will have been a hugely powerful use case that lays the foundation for further use cases leveraging this trust.

DAOs build upon this trust and allow forensic?#blockchain?sleuths to get to the bottom of what actually happened. As an example: Oh, this user sold this number of tokens, when he told the other user he would not, as spelled out in their peer-to-peer smart contract? His membership and permissions have been revoked. Simple.

There are issues of economics that are brilliant in their subtility but have more to do with slick operators using their position of power to their advantage than blockchain's inherent deceptiveness. What if you could go 100x long a token but were unable to short this same token, as many exchanges do? This would represent a massive long bias which would artificially pump the price up, allowing large bag holders to cash out on the run up, selling their tokens as the futures price screams upwards.

NFTs have taken a more active role lately in?#DeFi, with platforms allowing you to buy leveraged positions in projects or borrow against these digital assets. This borrowing is quite common, but not well known, in the art world, where top works of art auctioned at?Christie's?Rockefeller Center often are bought by only putting up a fraction of the cost, driving the price higher and extending increasingly juicy fees for auction houses as well.

While?#NFTs?did $17.6 billion last year, an increase of 21,000% from 2020, people like to point to Sina Estavi's $2.9M purchase of Jack Dorsey's tweet now only commanding a high of $30k-- in bids after weeks on OpenSea as a bellwether that NFTs are done.

I've been DMing and following Cent since 2020 and appreciate the platform for being able to simply and easily mint Tweets into NFTs, but it's important to consider that most Cent NFTs sell for a few hundred bucks on down to the price of coffee. Here's one from RAC, who is one of the most prominent voices in?#Web3?music, which reflects a value more towards the mean, $159.90. The bids for Jack's tweet at $30k represent more of a realistic valuation, but also consider that Cent is but one platform that is making an NFT of tweets and will not be the last.

An NFT is simply a smart contract pointing to the URI (a website URL, IPFS address, or other means to access an image) with services like Cent's just hyperlinking to the?Twitter?address and providing a platform.

Like for art, the value of an?#NFT?is simply what someone will pay, rationally or otherwise.

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Blockchain purists often see centralization as antithetical to their beliefs in the importance of decentralization and philosophical desire to deconstruct epicenters of project power. When it comes to DeFi, they do so as their own peril.

Very often, users will stake, let's say, USDC/UNI, which is?Circle's stablecoin & Uniswap's token on?Uniswap. You're likely to earn ~15% APR from the healthy 0.3% swap fee shared by LPs. Given the nefarious nature of impermanent loss for 50/50 pools, if UNI goes up 250% or down 75% at the time of unstaking, you will have eaten away at the entirety of those swap fees.

What if, however, you're staking UNI on?FTX--historically earning 2.6%, denominated in UNI--and then simply shorted the UNI, with a short position earning a historical 11.77%. You're earning 14.37% on a fully hedged position with a delta neutral structure that stamps out anything more than platform risk.

Should UNI go down, you will free up USD, from the short position being profitable, to take off the platform. If UNI goes up, you'll be nicely collateralized all the way up with your matching staked position.

Also consider that 14.37% is at the current UNI price. Should UNI double, your de facto return will be 28.74% on a delta neutral trade i.e. stamped out risk. Your broker is taking enormous exposed risk investing in TWTR or TSLA to attempt and beat their benchmarks and these stocks can absolutely crater at a moment's notice. Put options to provide downside coverage on these stocks, with such high implied volatility, are prohibitively expensive.

FTX does represent a centralized blockchain company, but even blockchain purists must admit that in practice it's exceedingly hard to find projects that are absent whales, undue influence, and extend a true across-the-board power parity. By using Ethereum Virtual Machine blockchain architecture, purists are themselves using an infrastructure that has disproportionate power at the?Ethereum Foundation. They don't consider this distasteful because these are trusted players with?Vitalik Buterin?Joseph Lubin?& others whom are well-regarded and have proven themselves to be largely beyond reproach.

Just as many decentralized autonomous organisations don't flinch at using Snapshot, an off blockchain voting DAO tool, those who consider centralized platforms to be distasteful should reevaluate such positions. There's a place for projects that span the spectrum in terms of its power concentrations and considering all blockchain platforms when seeking to earn a yield for on-chain assets is the winning approach.

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I was recently asked what the minimum number of people required to run a successful decentralized application (TVL staked >10M). Functionally, based on my experience helping developers launch a DApp and iron out the code, the correct answer is three.

Senior coder: This is someone that has deep competency in Solidity, or the blockchain’s underlying code, and has a real vision for how to materialize the use case. They research projects that are doing well what they’re aiming to do and have reference material on how to massage the code so that it operates seamlessly and safely. research is at the heart of this function to be able to catch wind any sort of developments a foot or being able to nimbly pivot to keep the platform at the forefront of what it’s intending to do.

Junior Coder/Mod: This project stalwart is active on the?Discord,?Discourse,?Telegram, email, and getting support to people that are using the platform swiftly. They have enough of an understanding of the project and the code involved to be able to give a competent and helpful answer to those that are seeking it. They focus on keeping a quality user experience humming and collecting critical bits of suggestions and input helpful to the senior coder to better polish the end product.

Writer/PR: Those projects that see an enormous level of staking and success appreciate the importance of communicating a powerful narrative as to why this decentralized application is important as compared to so many others. Very often projects will pour enormous resources into very impressive and innovative code but it’s not like “a build it and they will come” Field of dreams type scenario. Visibility is credibility and you have to broadcast aggressively what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, and that your project is a leader in a particular use case. If you can’t do it for your own platform then no one will and you can be absolutely sure that other platforms are going to be aggressively selling the merits of theirs.

If all three rendezvous in the discord and discuss the happenings of the day, and the progress of the fires put out, with a collective vision then they may not even necessitate an organizational lead. For others, having a titular head that keeps everyone on point with Trello or some type of task board is helpful. Very often engineers are used to this in a workplace environment and find it much more comforting than trying to go about it footloose and fancy free.

A powerful triumvirate of?#blockchain?brilliance and professional success can come out of a well structured and operationally sound three musketeers. I’ve seen it happen and it’ll happen again.

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The most important cryptocurrency project variable is often the least considered: token inflation.

With bitcoin you have a fixed 21M tokens and 6.25 newly minted every 10 minutes. There are 1M bitcoin miners clamoring, and ramping up resources, for a 1% chance to earn this block reward, amounting to a cool quarter mil in value.

While many will invest in a project on the soundness of the use case or strength of the management, not enough time is taken to appreciate the power of the tokenization structure. If you can control the number of potential tokens being minted then you de facto control the platform. That's why so many platforms are happy to airdrop 15% to whales to fight it out and speculate. They know, down the road, that this 15% could only amount to 1.5%, a blip on the project token table where the true power brokers march in with token awards when few are looking.

When you mint an ERC20, you can turn on or close off the ability of the token minter to mint further tokens. If you see, in the?#Solidity?code, that this functionality has been turned off and the project represents a fixed token amount, that's a positive sign that can better help you sleep at night. Even still, the DAO leads could very well pivot into a different token, but every investment into a company necessitates a certain level of trust in the leadership not to run amok.

This is also why?#DAO?leadership is so important. If you own a lion's share of the tokens, you can also vote through proposals that massively deleverage your investment into a platform. Imagine investing $1M into a platform and then voting through a proposal that lends $1M in tokens to your project to create a strategic partnership. There are many instances of?#DAOs?weaving connections that reward smart operators to hedge their investments in a savvy move to create a heads I win, tails I win type of can't lose scenario.

Before you invest in a crypto project, deep dive into the?GitBook, Whitepaper, and?Medium?posts on tokenomics. If these facts are obfuscated, or inflationary pressure too aggressive, then take a pass.

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The prohibitive nature of Ethereum mainnet fees for decentralized autonomous organization deployment is tilting developers to EVM sidechains or other chains altogether.

While the majority of the industry still uses the Ethereum mainnet or Ethereum Virtual Machine compatible chains to launch their DAOs, hosting more than 4200, as?Brian Newar?reports, increasingly cost is a consideration.

I was walking a client through one of the major ETH mainnet DAO platforms and, after populating all of the organisation's data, we were about to launch and saw that it was 7.7 ETH to do so. That's presently north of $24,000 in value on the mainnet for a function that costs a nickel on a less-congested sidechain.

Yet, many DAOs still deploy on the ETH mainnet for a few considerations you might not consider. One, requiring that people spend upwards of $100 in ETH to stake LP tokens or send tokens to an exchange creates an impediment that excludes a great many crypto users who lack such resources. This, as many projects see it, represents a good thing.

When someone sees an airdrop in their wallet from a project vying for their attention, having been active or invested in an influential project, users often spend five minutes seeing if they believe that a project has merit and hold 100%, sell 50%, or dump the airdrop entirely. Most users immediately dump.

If the chain is?Gnosis?,?Polygon Technology?or?Harmony?they can sell the tokens for a fraction of a cent. If the value of the airdrop is $110 and it's on the Ethereum mainnet, where it would cost $100 to sell it via?Uniswap?then many users would just take a pass for the time and potential slippage involved to potentially earn $10, if everything works out. Sometimes airdrops are sent & locked in a user's wallet, making them unable to move. Attempting to move a frozen token would burn through expensive gas.

If you're seeking to launch a DAO, I would suggest an inexpensive Ethereum Virtual Machine sidechain given the same Solidity-based Ethereum tooling. Most robust platforms like?DAOstack?&?Aragon?have coverage for less expensive chains as well.

Many sidechains settle their transactions, in bulk, on the?#Ethereum?mainnet such that they provide the same level of protection as the?#ETH?mainnet over the long-term and cost $0.05 to launch a?#DAO?rather than $24,000.

If you're aiming to earn airdrops in?#Web3, airdrop harvesting it's called, I would suggest staying active at the forefront of new decentralized applications. If you're active enough on?Discord,?Discourse?,?Telegram Messenger,?Reddit, Inc.,?Twitter, and present yourself as a helpful resource you stand a good chance of earning an airdrop or tokens of value enough to start your investing journey into this new ownership-focused tech movement.

Stay active, vigilant, and generous with your time and your hard work is likely to pay off as it has for me and in the experience of many thousands of others helping these new platforms get off the ground.

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I've been making it a habit of going to LA blockchain events to meet other developers, blockchain community leaders, and Web3 media personalities. Yesterday I went to the first anniversary of the?DeSo Foundation's blockchain in a swanky LA venue.

With so many blockchains out there, I would advise you take a sharp eye to what a blockchain is doing meaningfully different than their competitors, the degree to which their leadership is on the ball, and if they've been seeing traction in terms of active development from developers or user engagement from the community before you invest your time and attention.

The project leads or prominent community members are also often good bellwethers of a platform's success.

At the event, I chatted with?Nader Al-Naji?about the suitability of DeSo’s blockchain for social media data storage, how DeSo's DAO tooling extends the same features that you might see on Mirror, his visible push for the blockchain by going on TV & prominent podcasts—where he’s been well-received, his thoughts on blockchain education, decentralized social media as a tool for uplifting creators, how DeSo resonates so well with my students when I frame it correctly, and the DeSo DeveloperHub. With years of going to LA Blockchain Week, I’ve met some prominent project leads and Nader’s charisma and razor sharp intellect is readily, and immediately, apparent.?

Alex Valaitis?sat with about a dozen of us to talk about his takeaways from his days at LinkedIn, the response to various challenges of misperceptions as it relates to the use of community coins for users not yet on the platform or an iframe for private key entry, hitting the conference scene across the US to made strategic alliances for DeSo into some important circles, doing speeches to rooms of engineers and how well they convert over to DeSo developers once all of the blockchain’s merits are plainly apparent, and his vision for scaling by hitting home the suitability of this blockchain as compared to so many others. Very inspiring sentiments backed by a passion mirroring those of us in attendance, feeding off of his energy.?

Brian Krassenstein?& his brother?Eddie Krassenstein?are central figures as hosts of the DeSo's most popular news YouTube channel. They spoke to a few of us about their process of understanding the social media algorithms and the growth hacking success that have allowed them to be successful in tech, helping their portfolio projects scale, and promoting their own content. I love hearing bitcoin stories from a decade ago so to hear about about Mt. Gox, QuadrigaCX, and the birth of blockchain is always fascinating and, as you might imagine, being YouTubers, they are very engaging storytellers.

This is a promising project championed by?Chamath Palihapitiya,?Dharmesh Shah, & tech visionaries I respect so I jumped on board and have been impressed during the year I've been active.

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There's some visible friction from decentralization purists that bristle when VCs or large, influential players are given token allocations which keep them in positions of influence.

This has long been a discussion for?#DAOs: How do we get a close as possible to a partnership of equals in a horizontal organisational structure, with a governance that values the opinions of all community members with an influence on par with their peers?

While this is an admirable aim, it's very difficult in practice. Also consider that the lion share of tokens are being distributed, without cost, to?#NFT?community members who are starting their weekend with, oftentimes, hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of crypto as a thank you, of sorts, for contributing to the nascence of this ecosystem by buying a?Bored Ape Yacht Club, Mutant Ape Yacht Club, or Bored Ape Kennel Club NFT.

The idea of slicing off airdrops for high-volume buyers on?OpenSea--as LooksRare did--or rewarding those who poured in the hefty?#Ethereum?cost for one of these blue-chip NFTs is that the?#DAO?founders are hoping that the airdropped tokens will not be immediately dumped, the fate of 90% of tokens that happen upon someone's wallet unannounced, but, rather, carefully selected recipients would?#HODL?and actually use their current resources to buy more of the project's tokens. This model has worked swimmingly for?Uniswap Labs?and many top blockchain projects, intent on rewarding early adopters and also incentivizing them to redouble their efforts to trumpet platforms in their infancy and trying to scale.

If compared to the traditional?#VC?ecosystem, however, the power dynamic is far more favorable to the individual. Often ownership of a project, absent sprinkled options for early employees, is incredibly concentrated. These?#airdrops?weave in tens of thousands of uses and very often give them the resources to begin building wealth or have the foundational resources to launch their passion project on their terms, without having to burn time seeking cash.

While they may have allocated tokens more than a standard airdrop recipient, the?#apecoin?#DAO?leadership team represents the most respected and powerful voices in blockchain in?Alexis Ohanian Sr.?Amy Wu?Maaria Bajwa?Yat Siu?Dean Steinbeck. By weight class, you're punching heavyweight beyond the scope of what has been seen in recent memory. Any sort of community that has the attention of these tech leaders, I would be interested in a position in simply due to the success of their prior ventures and degree to which respected leaders look to them as tech tastemakers.

New companies would give any amount of equity requested to get somewhere in the circle that these?#blockchain?behemoths operate in so giving a few percent for them to trumpet this project to their sizable and influential audience appears to be a worthwhile, and strategically sound, trade.

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